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Why Is Free Memory as Reported by free Shrinking?

April 26, 2017Free memory reported shrinking

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Why Is Free Memory as Reported by free Shrinking?

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The “free” figure printed by free doesn’t include memory used as a disk buffer cacheshown in the buffers column. If you want to know how much memory is really free add the buffers amount to free. Newer versions of free print an extra line with this info. The disk buffer cache tends to grow soon after starting Linux up. As you load more programs and use more files, the contents get cached. It will stabilize after a while.